An anonymous personal essay on The Billfold, a website about finance, takes on a subset of the many contractors Uber doesn't quite employ. Only this time, the non-employees aren't drivers.
In "My Nine Months as an Uber Customer Service Rep," an anonymous telecommuting contractor who answered a Craigslist ad for a $15 an hour gig recalls hearing from passengers like "the woman whose driver showed up so drunk that she pushed him into the passenger seat and drove herself to Kennedy Airport... Or the sleepy guy who ordered a ride home only to wake up in line at a McDonald’s drive-thru."
The essay, like a door slightly ajar, casts a small shaft of light onto a secretive company — the anonymity on the part of the author is, of course, the result of some non-disclosure agreements that are mentioned.
In just one funny irony from the essay:
Walking us through a PowerPoint deck from Legal, [our boss] made sure we understood to never refer to Uber drivers as “employees,” which wasn’t hard, since we weren’t technically Uber employees either.
Yep, Uber's customer service representatives, or CSRs, are technically employed by ZeroChaos," essentially a pass-through HR agency that touts itself as a clearinghouse for
'contingent worker solutions.'"
Regardless of employee status, as you might expect, there was lots of work for an Uber CSR to do. Often, that work was simple. A $5 appeasement was offered to disgruntled drivers, making the writer feel like "Robing Hood."
There were, by my count, about 190 things that could go wrong with an Uber ride, from sexual harassment to smelly drivers. We had templates for everything. Unpleasant smells were not to receive $5 in Uber “appeasement,” and nor were chatty drivers. Cigarette smoke was unfortunate, “but don’t worry, we’ll share your concern with this driver.” No-shows were refunded, as were stolen Uber rides.
The essay is maybe worth a read in its entirety, but it overall, it does dismiss Uber as not "bad" but "evil." And sure, as much as any company can be said to possess such qualities, maybe it is. But there's also a possibly disgruntled non-employee element to it, since "at the end of nine months Uber declined to pick up my contract and I returned to my old industry."
Anyway, the writer won't be taking Uber anytime soon, but not, perhaps, for the reasons you think. It's too expensive, they write, for someone making as little money as an Uber CSR. "Most CSRs in my cohort had never taken Uber before, because they couldn’t afford it," the essay concludes.
Related: Uber CEO Heckled By Cab Drivers On Late Show With Stephen Colbert
